Do y'all think persimmon corn will attract hogs better than regular deer corn or is it about the same. Since it smells sweet I figured it would be better but I want y'all's 0.02
This discussion comes up quite a bit on various hunting forums. This is my take...
While scented corn, soured corn, corn mixed with jello/kool-aid, sweet feed, commercial scented 'attractants' and so on all seem like they should logically be better attractants than corn alone, it has been my experience with testing several of them that they are not. Yes, hogs may (eventually) show up and eat the stuff and they may really like it, but hogs will eventually show up and eat just about anything (except I have never gotten them to eat any of the free, unused pumpkins I have gotten after Halloween for several years).
The idea behind scented attractants is that they will be able to attract hogs over longer distances. Supposedly, hogs can smell truffles up to 7 miles away above ground and up to 25 feet underground. I have seen these numbers repeated several times on the internet.
No doubt hogs have a great sense of smell and maybe they can smell your special bait from a farther distance. However, the real question is whether or not they will act on it over that distance MORE SO than they will act on just coming to corn. In the various tests I have done over the years, I just don't find that to be the case.
Hogs are only going to travel so far for a resource. Maybe they can smell the persimmon corn from 7 miles away, but they can also smell all of the other resources available to them in that 7 mile distance. They will be full and done eating long before they get to you.
I think it was flintknapper who pointed out that if you have hogs in the area, they will find your corn. Of course, if you don't have them in the area, then they won't. You aren't going to get hogs that aren't already in your immediate area anyway.
Most of the time when I see or hear about people testing a new attractant, they place it in a location where they are already baiting hogs, such as running apple corn or persimmon corn (in your case) through a feeder that has probably been set up for many seasons. I saw an episode of Pigman where he talked about the great success of using some attractant that the dumped on the ground all around a feeder he had running on his property and was able to shoot a pig on the following day. He proclaimed the attractant to be a great success and recommended that his viewers purchase it. Strangely, he is apparently no longer using said attractant since they stopped sponsoring him. Anyway, the point is that if you have a feeder that is already up and running, then you have an established bait spot that animals have learned about and will check on a regular or irregular basis. Your feeder is a known resource of the area, right? So if you add attractant to your feeder area, how do you know if the attract really worked, or if the hogs just came in anyway for the corn they expected to find? I know from game camera images that I have had hogs show up to a feeder for up to 10 days after the feeder was empty. So even without any corn there, hogs still showed up. How is that for a miracle attractant?
Trying new attractants is fun and interesting. We are all looking for that miracle attractant that is going to give us the edge. I would like to say that there is no harm in trying, but that may not be true, either. Here are some of the downsides I have experienced in trying new attractant products and foods.
1. The introduction of a new smell into an area may actually temporarily drive away hogs and other animals, not because the smell is bad, but because it is a change to the environment. Many animals do not like sudden changes. This may actually delay the benefit of attracting hogs. Once they get used to it, then it isn't a problem.
2. Expense. Most of the attractants you will try add expense to your hunting. Some of the expenses are minimal. Some are outrageous. I have tried and have used apple-scented corn and sweet feed, but both when they were comparably priced to plane corn. There have been times that sweet feed has actually been cheaper than regular corn, which is a benefit.
3. Additional handling issues. This won't be the case for persimmon corn, but things like soured corn and attractants that you don't mix with corn in your feeders require additional steps. Soured corn requires time to make, care in transporting (and you don't want to spill any of this in your vehicle), and then deployment.
4. Some attractants have a sticky factor. Apple corn does as do some of the additives that include sugar in them. This can be a exacerbated in particularly humid areas. I never had a problem with apple corn gumming up the feeder as it wasn't that sticky, but it is a potential issue.
5. Sweet feed can actually absorb moisture from the air or if you get blowing rain that gets on your spinner plate, the sweet feed will absorb it and SWELL, gumming up your feeder.
6. Animals other than hogs may find and consume the special bait long before hogs arrive. For example, every time I try watermelons, the deer and raccoons will devour them in short order.
For me, the bottom line determining factor is that if these great attractants really worked that much better, then we would all be using them and all be shooting a lot more hogs. What I have noticed is that even when people swear by a given attractant as working really well is that quite strangely, they don't use the attractant all the time and they don't seem to be killing any more hogs. No doubt hogs are attracted to and eat a lot of stuff, but I just don't see where any of it is particularly better than just plain corn. YMMV